Yesterday John Reese from Blogrush sent out a very long update letter to address a few things. You can read the entire email here in a text file, it’s too long to publish on my blog.
But I am going to publish a snippet of the email where they talk about cheaters.
And a quick word to any ‘cheats’ that might be reading this letter… it’s very possible that you may come up with something extremely creative that temporarily gets by us, but you should know something… IT’S NOT GOING TO BE WORTH YOUR TIME. And I’m not just talking about the tiny amount of traffic that you’ll receive before we shut you off.
You see, we have other plans in the works…
If you attempt to cheat or abuse our network in anyway, shape, or form, we will not hesitate to come after you. Our company is well funded and has plenty of resources. And we WILL use them to punish you to the fullest extent of the law (and civil court process). Oh, you think you can just hide behind some anonymous proxy IPs? Sorry, it’s not that easy. ANY reason you’d have to try and cheat the BlogRush network for traffic and any attempt you make to monetize that traffic will lead directly to your front door — whether it’s AdSense, any affiliate program in the world, any online pharmacy, porn site, casino… ANYTHING. We will follow the trail and it WILL eventually lead to you.
Our hard-working company provides the income for MANY families. As
the CEO of our company, I take this very seriously. I HAVE TO. People that attempt to abuse or cheat BlogRush are affecting the livelihood of all my employees and their families. And I will do everything in my power to protect them — it’s MY DUTY.So for all you cheaters that joined BlogRush and had your fun trying to siphon off some traffic, hopefully it was fun. And I’ll go ahead and make this statement right now… IF you were one of the people that has been cheating our network I’m going to give you ONE opportunity… quit now and we’ll pretend it never happened. I think that’s more than fair.
BUT… if you continue after this point, all bets are off. We WILL eventually discover what you’re doing, where you’re trying to send traffic, and we will prosecute you. I GUARANTEE IT. Sorry, but WE HAVE NO CHOICE NOW.
Don’t get me wrong. I applaud this idea of protecting your investment and I don’t want to see any cheaters beat the system either, for anyone. Hate cheaters. What I don’t get is why publish this email with these strong words?
Two things are happening here, you choose which is correct.
1. John Reese just pissed off the cheaters who will now work triple time to mess up his system. You don’t challenge hackers.
or
2. John is building what marketers call “social proof”. That’s an argument methodology you build to create credibility in your product/service. EVERY good marketer uses this. Testimonials, hate letters. The idea is, “hey, if others are talking about it and using it and trying to take it down, it must be working!”
Or maybe it’s both. I don’t know.
I know this. I think Blogrush just added gasoline to the forest fire.
Agreed Jim, I think that challenging hackers might be the wrong way to go, but on the other hand what a great way to have hackers do your work for you. I’m not sure the email message was all that professional from the leader of a company. I might have had them post it differently.
but how far will the fire burn?
The rambling Reese diatribe just struck me as more pathetic than anything I wanted or needed to read via email. He would have been better blogging that where subscribers could follow if they really wanted to.
We tried the Blogrush widget on one of our blogs. Thousands of impressions not a single clickthru. Goodbye.
What really struck me was the sense of an utter and complete disconnect from the realities of the web today. Simply stated if you run a program which offers to give you “credits” that can lead to “traffic” and the method you give people to “earn” these credits can be automated, it will be.
The email left me with the strong feeling that it never occurred to anyone working on this project that people would attempt to automate the generation of credits, reduce the possibility of any traffic loss and attempt to exploit and mathematic or programatic opportunities presented. Not that I think people should do this, just that I know they will, and was struck by the sense that John and Crew did not.
I suggest he checks out some of the session videos from DefCon to get his head straight. Somebody is living in a bubble far far away from reality.
The people who can really exploit it badly that it will hurt the network are the people he will not get regardless how much money he throws at it to “get” them (unless he spends the money on a guerilla army and starts invading some independent nations with them).
The only thing this email did is
a) damages his reputation (for example I think now that he is an idiot. I didn’t think that before that email)
b) provoked some guys (in addition to the guys who might abuse or want to abuse the network) who might feel compelled now to show him that he is an idiot and wrong
tsts…
Why bother?
As a subscriber to his, it came to no suprise, coming from the drama king.
I always hear of John Reese being one of the top so-and-so, but seriously, that was one email I was surprised to receive (not on any of his other mailing lists). I thought it was pretty juvenile and if he really needed to sound out the hackers, go to them direct. Just let us ‘users’ hear what we are more concerned about – the ‘improvements’.
Hi,
I am the guy who warned John Reece that his system was hacked. I don’t use his BlogRush system because I don’t believe it will work on the long run.
Every automated system can be hacked by reverse engineering, and trying to catch the thieves, is like the Music and Film industry who wants to stop people sharing the things they like.
John Reese is a clever guy who knows that he needs other people content to get “Him” money in it’s pockets. This is also something Hackers know, so if John is so pissed off, it is because, he wants the same, and was caught at his own game.
He is willing to pay people 10 $ an hour to approve websites, and this is a step in the good direction I think, but the directory of yahoo was also closed after a while for not beeing lucrative enough. And when did you use the Dmoz site ? I guess not much ;..
David Norden
http://www.secretmarketinglinks.com
Wow, how unprofessional. A good CEO would never send out a public e-mail of this sort. I think it would be sufficient to combat hackers behind the scenes, because, as Jim says, such public hacker-bashing will likely backfire.
I think he's very serious and well aware that his comments will be seen by hackers as a challenge. Maybe he's prepared for such a challenge.